The concept of human rights was formed in the consciousness of society back in the 18th century.
Today we regard our privacy as inviolable and feel relatively safe. The society recognized and legalized the right to intellectual property, secrecy of communication, freedom of speech, leaving only one loophole (but what a loophole!) - for the special services.
It is no secret that today it will not be a big problem for "special" government services to listen to telephone conversations and monitor Internet correspondence, satellite tracking of mobile phones, search for wanted criminals using video images from cameras and satellites owned by individuals and companies. The question is, to what extent are representatives of the state security agencies exercising their legal right, by court order, to gain access to “private” information protected by our notions of human rights.
The latest high-profile scandals associated with the name of Edward Snowden have shaken the authority of the intelligence services and our belief that they intend to protect us. The former CIA employee, disillusioned with the methods of work of the department, presented to the general public unique secret data on the programs of total control over the population of almost the entire world. The countries that have developed and implemented such programs include the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, India, China, Sweden and Switzerland.
Edward Snowden.
Snowden made secret documents available to reporters from The Guardian and The Washington Post, which were only made public in 2038. And here a scandal erupted. It would seem that a representative of the state security agencies divulged a state secret, for which he should be severely punished. However, by his actions, he uncovered an even greater crime - a crime against human rights on a global scale. Today, every step, deed, plans and even thoughts (shared with a friend, for example) can become known to interested parties. Power is in the hands of the one who has the information, and information about each of us is accumulated and stored in specially designed control programs.
The most large-scale of these programs is Echelon and SOUD. These are international programs that conditionally divide the world of intelligence into two pole camps during the Cold War. The first of them, using the Echelon program, includes the USA, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand; the second, using "SOUD", at one time included the USSR and the countries of the Warsaw Pact.
The foundation for the existence of the Echelon was laid back during the Second World War, when, while in Europe, special units of the secret government services of the United States and Great Britain began to create their own listening points.
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The organization was officially formed in 1947 with the conclusion of a secret agreement of the above-named countries, called the UKUSA Agreement. The purpose of the agreement was to combine the technical and agent capabilities of countries for espionage in the electronic sphere.
International also can be called the Tempora program, which began its existence in 2011. It aims to collect the maximum amount of data, and 850,000 employees of the UK Government Communications Center and the US National Security Agency (US NSA) process this information for their own purposes.
The UK Government Communications Center in Cheltenham is the operator of the Tempora program.
The data transmission lines created within the framework of the program (there are about 200 of them) are capable of operating at a download speed of about 10 Gb / s. At the same time, the management plans to increase their bandwidth to 100 Gb / s. It is difficult to simply imagine how much information is passing through the hands of intelligence officers. Even lawyers for the UK Government Communications Center say that it is simply impossible to name at least an approximate number of listened and tracked subscribers of social networks and Internet users and regular telephone, there is literally an "endless list".
There are also national control programs. The most famous is PRISM. This program has been operating in the United States since 2007 and is officially considered top secret. However, after Snowden's revelations, its existence was publicly acknowledged by James Klepper himself, the head of US national intelligence. With its help, employees of the National Security Agency gain access to chats of Internet users, read their personal correspondence, track phone calls and Skype conversations, not to mention the interception of transmitted data, viewing video and photo documents. The purpose of PRISM's work is called the fight against terrorist threats, therefore, data of foreigners and those US citizens who communicate with them or carry out correspondence fall into its zone of interest. The greatest focus is on the privacy of non-US citizens living in any other country, providedthat they can pose a potential threat to one of the most powerful states in the world. In other words, all of us, residents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and so on, are of interest to the US secret service under the pretext of potential danger.
Slide from a presentation on how PRISM works, provided by Edward Snowden.
NSA employees have been granted access to their servers and, in general, to their work by the world's largest computer companies, including Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Apple, Skype, Facebook and some others. There is also a legal basis for accessing the data of these companies. For example, the same Snowden published the decision of the FISC court (most recently - dated April 25 this year), according to which another firm, Verizon, a fairly well-known American cellular operator, is also obliged to provide special services with access to its data. The NSA now handles 1.7 billion emails and phone calls every day.
NSA global intelligence map.
A similar program works in Russia, it has received a long name - System of technical means for ensuring the functions of operational-search activities, abbreviated SORM. In 1996, its first version began to work, it specialized in wiretapping phone calls. And four years later, due to the growing popularity of the Internet and the ubiquitous spread of social networks, a second version of it appeared, focusing just on Internet users.
Local telecom operators are also required to cooperate with security services. Otherwise, they will simply be deprived of their license. Legally, wiretapping of our mobile phones and viewing of personal correspondence on the Internet is possible only in accordance with a court decision, but there are other "federal laws" according to which representatives of special services receive the necessary information much faster by communicating with operators and providers directly.
Do not forget about the existence of a "cyber police" specializing in the search for criminals via the Internet and social networks. The exchange of information between Russia and Belarus in this area has already been established: in 2012 alone, militiamen and policemen of the two states exchanged 324 inquiries.
In general, we can say that the methods of work of PRISM and SORM are similar, the scale is also similar. The only difference is that we know much less about the activities of the Russian special services due to the fact that no one disclosed information about it.
What are the capabilities of the special services?
The potential opportunities for intelligence officers working under these programs are endless. The German politician Malte Spitz conducted an interesting experiment: with the help of the journalists of the local newspaper Die Zeit, he compared his metadata for six months (by the way, for this, obtained from a mobile operator) with information from social networks and the media, as a result of which he received a detailed layout of all his actions for the specified period - every minute. In other words, our whole life is in full view.
A day in the life of Malte Spitz.
The existing programs find their application primarily in the field of preventing terrorist threats. Representatives of the NSA speak about this goal as the main one, defending their positions after the recognition of the fact of total surveillance. The US authorities have already officially announced the prevention of a series of terrorist acts as a positive result of it, and they even called the PRISM program "a blessing for society."
However, there are other areas of application of advanced modern technologies - for example, international politics. For example, the American special services are listening to negotiations and looking through the correspondence of EU officials, installing bugs at international summits and conferences. The press reported on attempts to eavesdrop on the talks between Putin and Medvedev, on the eavesdropping of the G20 summit (2009) - these are concrete examples.
With the help of such programs, it is possible to control the policy directions of an individual state, "quarrel" with friendly states, set up public opinion against those officials who are not pleasing to the interests of the country, look for juicy details of the personal lives of individual leaders and control them in this way, and much more. However, politics should be left to politicians (such methods have been used, probably from time immemorial), the only question is the technologies used.
It is “economically feasible” to use the capabilities of such programs in industrial espionage. So, in 1994, the German media accused the American special services of spying on the promising company Enercon, which was developing wind power generators. According to the data presented by the press, as a result of spying on Enercon, the development drawings were transferred to representatives of an American company, which managed to patent the novelty earlier than the German competitor and for a long time did not give him the opportunity to enter the local market that had already been captured by it, thereby causing about 100 millionth damage (in stamps) to the country's economy.
Why is total control terrible for ordinary people? Probably their complete powerlessness in front of him. With the capabilities of modern technical means, there is even no need to study the correspondence in detail or listen to calls from each person. Some time ago we got acquainted with such a concept as "metadata". Metadata is actually statistical information, data about our incoming and outgoing calls and messages: their time, place, duration, people involved in the contact, the topic discussed. If necessary, you can decrypt the text of the message as well - these are already "descriptive" options for working with metadata. However, just from the "statistical" part of the metadata, a lot of useful information can be extracted. What is it?
The basics of working with statistics were formed during the Great Patriotic War. In general, the war gave a strong impetus to the development of modern technologies for both military and peaceful applications. So, when the decryption abilities of one of the parties were limited, only in the place, time, duration of sending a radio message could one guess about its content. For example, in this way they guessed about the movements of the enemy, the appearance of reinforcements, and so on. Then the famous portable encryption machine "Enigma" helped the military.
The Immersion server can help the layman today. If you give the server employees access to your metadata, they, not knowing the content and topics of the correspondence, will determine the most important messages for you, your circle of acquaintances and their strength. With the help of such information, you can already understand how and to whom you can be useful, which of your connections may be interesting and whether it is worth activating them. And this is the most accessible information about you, obtained through the Internet.
Immersion work.
The special services have access not only to statistics, but also to the content of messages and calls. Your life, plans for the future, even your thoughts will become known. And all this can be used. Make a puppet out of a person, and no matter which way: to approach the issue correctly psychologically, forcing a person to perform the necessary actions so that he does not even notice it, manipulating his interests or hobbies, based on his position in life or roughly - using little-known to the public details of his personal life. What if this information gets to “the wrong people”? Well, we are returning to the primitive system, slavery, only on a new, informational level. Still, history has a cyclical development …
The programs use a "semantic archive" and similar systems to track information in the public domain and on the Internet, including social networks and blogs. This is a system that allows you to create information storages, where data comes from various databases and any other sources - from online libraries to any file document. "Semantic archive" has a modular structure, which allows you to customize the system configuration. The system is capable of automatically processing, analyzing and synthesizing information.
One of the principles of the "semantic archive" system.
Suppose that the programs we already know work for keywords like "politics", "terror", "explosion" and others. By texting with a friend in a chat or communicating with him on Skype, we can no longer express our opinion about the behavior of our leadership, in general about the policy of the state, we can not even discuss our plans for the future, share our innermost: after all, we do not know which words are "key", whether they will not be regarded as a "potential threat" and whether they will write us into the ranks, as they used to say, "enemies of the people." This is all - information, material for processing, potential compromising evidence, and not only on ourselves, but also on the person with whom we communicate. It is somewhat reminiscent of the Soviet era and the forbidden jokes in the kitchen, for which one could end up either in prison or in a mental hospital.
And if you add fingerprints in passports, an officially banned facial recognition technology to electronic surveillance? In addition, there are programs downloaded via torrent, which often contain viruses that independently "extract" interesting information from your personal computer, and about what we post and write in Odnoklassniki, Facebook and VKontakte …
Using modern means of communication, every day we run the risk of being hooked by someone: it can be like representatives of the special services, for whom we can serve as a tool or a “consumable”, or the same hackers who are simply profiting from this business.
The gravity of the current situation is that not only a person, but also a whole society has become powerless and powerless. Today, it is not difficult to track down the disaffected, dissenting and doubting people. Is it possible that soon there will simply not be people who could potentially become whistleblowers and guard society, directly speaking about corruption, abuse of power, even lawlessness? These include independent journalists, scientists, representatives of new trends in politics and culture. According to Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University, we can simply become a global "nation of sheep", which will be told what to eat, drink, do and how to think, and we will not even guess about it.
Already today, some companies understand the danger and are trying to protect themselves. German companies, taught by the experience of Enercon, are trying to export their servers to other countries along with equipment to enterprises and not take foreign students for practice. However, they cannot prohibit their employees from using modern popular Skype and Facebook.
The founder of WikiLeaks J. Assange reminds Internet users that everything, absolutely all their actions are recorded and stored on servers. Those who possess such data know more about us than ourselves. They recorded every moment of our life, something that even we ourselves do not remember.
It is curious that even after the US authorities recognized the fact of total surveillance, laws prohibiting it were not introduced. Mass protests against the accusations against Snowden, Assange, Manning were ignored. Although the States are now collecting signatures for a petition to the White House, and if activists collect 100,000 votes in a month (more than half have already been collected), the government will have to give an official response to the petition.
The FBI, meanwhile, is trying to legislatively expand its powers in the field of wiretapping and reading messages, as well as expand the range of companies that should oblige to cooperate with it. Society, meanwhile, is trying to organize a rebuff to the encroachment on its rights, creating eavesdropping-free servers and companies and public organizations, the purpose of which is to establish a ban on such unauthorized actions of the special services and limit their scope.
At the government level, the Council of Ministers tried to deal with the issue of damage inflicted on the Russian state. Representatives of Microsoft, Google, Skype and Facebook were invited to the open session. Representatives of only the first company came: they officially announced that they had not transferred any personal data of users to the NSA bypassing the law, the same correspondence response was received from other companies.
No one gives an answer to the question of how to avoid total control.